Of Jam and Memory

[quislet]

Some twenty years ago, I packed up all of my earthly belongings and returned to college.  I had dropped out after my freshman year to follow my heart around the world to chase after belief, love and discipline.  (Hey, I kept two out of three!)  I was returning to school with a wife and a baby, driving two thirds of the way across the country from the Pacific to Lake Michigan, across the Rockies in January.  Into boxes went our most treasured possessions, packed away for storage.  We folded the boxes shut around babythings and photos and music and notes.  We packed away a couple of kilos of my Academic Decathlon medals, physical evidence of the only time I ever defeated ginger_rose in an academic competition.  We packed away a jar full of love notes she had sent me one Valentine’s Day before I proposed.  We packed away her Star Trek paperbacks that I had read while feeling all creeped out at her parents’ house during our courtship (more than a few of them A.C. Crispin novels).  We packed away my sketches and designs of the homestead we have yet to build.  We packed away the little painting I have of the Charles Bridge in Prague, where I was nearly arrested for preaching on the street.   We packed away six jars of wild plum jam that her mother had made one summer in southern Oregon, wrapped in the local Cave Junction newspaper.

Over the years, we’ve moved a few times.  We made the trip from California to Chicago and back every summer during college.  We moved to Florida.  We moved to DC.  The treasures moved, too, but in a different orbit.  They were sequestered at my parents’ house during our college days.  They followed my mother to Oregon after her divorce to hide in her apartment attic while she finished her own degrees.  I had always meant to fly out, pick them up and drive them back home, but the timing never quite worked out.  A few years ago, when my mother was moving into her new house, I finally noticed that this scenario had long become ludicrous.  I still didn’t have time to transport them myself, but I could write a check.  I hired movers to hie a small truckload of memories home to us across the country, unwittingly reversing the steps of my great-great-great grandfather’s Oregon Trail journey from Fairfax County.  The memories sat and seasoned for a while in the garage, and then that spring, as we were clearing out some space, we unpacked the memories and started re-integrating them into our lives.  There’s a tired maple bedroom set that my mother-in-law left to my eldest.  There’s a wedding dress hiding in a box downstairs.  There’s a clockwork bird that has sung to pyratelady’s daughter and there are odd bits of clothing that have made their way back into my family’s wardrobe.

There are also six jars of wild plum jam on the kitchen counter.  They've been there for nearly a year.  They are, to me, my dearly departed mother-in-law as much as her ashes on the mantle are.  She was a fascinating woman, and I loved her very much.  She was frightfully odd, and not known for her talent at mothering, but she always inspired me to think outside the narrow confines of the world I had been raised in.  I always had a rather strained relationship with her cooking, even in those far-off days before I had learned to feed myself and others. 

I love jam.  And I loved her.

But it’s twenty-year-old jam.  It’s been in attics and trucks and who knows where.  It could probably kill me.

But I couldn’t throw it out.

This year, taking a tentative step closer to tasting this distant memory, I enlisted the sage food-safety advice of terribleturnip and  sequinedlovenun.  They assured me that there was almost certainly nothing deadly in this jam that is as old as my daughters, but that it might have lost its flavor.  Feeling safer with their “almost certainty” than with most peoples’ facts, I toasted up some bread and decided to take the plunge.  I twisted off the canning ring, noting that ginger_rose​’s handwriting on the label looks more like it did in high school than it does today.  I popped off the canning lid with a butter knife.  There was a fat column of jam in the center, just wider than the narrow mouth of the canning jar, swimming in a merlot-colored syrup.  I gouged out a bit of the wobbly column with my knife and tasted it, grabbing the counter to steel myself for one of the food-borne reveries I’ve succumbed to when tasting the foods of my past.  Nothing.  There was a sort of vague, non-specific fruit taste and a slightly mealy, jellified pectin consistency.  When I concentrated, I was able to identify only the faintest whisper of the feral, spicy edge I half-remembered from a summer long past.  It was an odd Laodicean moment that left me contemplating the nature of memory while I pondered what to do with the nearly tasteless goo in my mouth.

I was reminded that memory is inherently porous.  Humans don’t do a particularly good job of storing accurate data in memories.  We’re much better at storing impressions and feelings, presumably because those are represented by brain chemicals and not just some abstract set of facts.  Over time, our memories can tend to drift and fade.  Sometimes they can be evoked powerfully by a sense-memory.  I’ve had this happen a few times, going weak in the knees with the taste of fresh marionberries or of kumamoto oysters from bays I played in as a child.  We humans also have a tendency to distort memories with emotion, letting a positive emotion erode painful memories, or vice versa.  The jam on my tongue didn’t match my memory of the jam.  How much of that was a loss of volatile flavonoids, and how much of that was a shift in my own memory?  Had I expanded the memory of the jam with fond feelings for college summers in the country and time spent with my own infant daughters?  Just how much of my memories of my mother-in-law has fogged in the same way?  I should probably ask my cognitive scientist sister sometime.

The answer is surely that more of my memory is clouded, edited and idealized than I would like to admit, but is that really a problem?  Isn’t that really how human memory works?  Our brains aren’t structured to store bits and bytes of random data with unerring accuracy.  They’re squishy and all of this language and metadata we all care about so much is probably a byproduct of evolving just enough brainpower to know how not to kill ourselves with eating suspicious foods.  Like jam.

Besides, my relationship with my mother-in-law has evolved pretty radically over time, and so have I.  Why shouldn’t my memories do the same?  I remember being a little scared of the woman who would become my mother-in-law.  Her very existence challenged my worldview.  Everything about her was so outside the box of my neatly defined Evangelical world that I found myself reeling whenever I was around her (thus, hiding in the back room reading Star Trek novels).  Over time, I found that some of the things I most cherished about her daughter were also comfortably nestled down in the midst of her own alienness.  My fears grew into love, and we developed a wonderful relationship, staying up late to drink together and talk conspiracies and cryptozoology and heretical Biblical interpretations.  Years after she passed, I find that my own worldview is much more akin to hers than to the one I had held back then. 

And so, I find that it doesn’t really matter to me that my memories may have dulled.  It doesn’t really matter to me that the jam may have lost its flavor.  Everything has a season, be it a body, a flavonoid or even a memory.  What matters to me is that I cherish her memory, and ever shall.  Maybe I’ll put one of these jars up on the mantle, too.

Comments

[ginger-rose.livejournal.com]

Thank you, love. :) Wonderfully said.

Beautiful

[im-geva.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing.

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

Wow. Beautiful.